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There was a lot going on in the year 1941.
It was the year Orson Welles’ iconic film Citizen Kane premiered to mixed reviews, but is now widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
It was the year the Japanese occupation started in Malaya. Japan also attacked Pearl Harbour, the US waged war against Japan, and the US officially entered World War 2.
Also in 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, a German high-ranking Nazi officer, received a memorandum urging him to prepare for the “final solution of the Jewish question”.
The final solution was the Holocaust — Nazi Germany’s intentional, systematic, state-sanctioned persecution and genocide of over 6 million European Jews.
However, the ideology that led to the Holocaust started long before 1941.
Antisemitism, or discrimination against Jewish people, has a 2000-year-old history. In Europe, antisemitism has been around for centuries before the rise of Nazism.
Antisemitism reached its height in Germany when Adolf Hitler came into power as the absolute ruler of the state. Hitler did not invent antisemitism, he capitalised on it.
Hitler lived in Vienna for several years when he was younger. At that time, Vienna had a mayor who was very anti-Jewish and antisemitism was very common in the city.
He was a German soldier during World War 1. As with many other German soldiers, Hitler could not accept the fact that the German Empire lost the war.
A myth began circulating within the German army that they didn’t in fact lose the war, but they were betrayed — a “stab in the back” by the Jews. Hitler, being part of the army, subscribed to this myth.
The Nazis continued to condemn the Jews, including blaming them for Germany’s major economic crisis following their defeat in the war and pushed for the expulsion of the Jews to make the country economically strong again.
This was what Hitler stood for in the 1932 elections that led to his victory and position as the Chancellor of Germany.
After which, the sheer weight of persecution towards Jews continued to escalate, culminating in the Holocaust.
“The Jewish Question”
After coming into power, Hitler began a systematic campaign to rid Germany of Jews. Synagogues were burned down, Jewish businesses were boycotted.
The 1935 Nuremberg laws denied Jews their German citizenship, forbade intermarrying of Jews and non-Jews, and took away most of their political rights. As other European countries fell under Nazi rule, the Nuremberg laws applied to Jews there as well.
A Nazi-provoked riot in 1938, known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, destroyed over 250 synagogues, and countless homes and Jewish businesses. Over 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps, but they were not killed. They were made to promise that they will leave Germany.
However, most countries were not willing to take Jews in.
In 1939, the Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile killing squads, were deployed in Poland — men, women, and children were killed on the spot.
The Nazis boasted of killing 200 Polish citizens a day within a week of the invasion. They wiped out entire villages and systematically rounded up people for transportation to ghettos.
The ghettos were unhygienic, overcrowded, partitioned sections of cities where they were denied proper food and medical services. Hundreds of thousands died due to starvation and disease, and over 1000 ghettos were established in Europe during World War 2.
Naturally, a lot of them tried escaping the ghettos and going into hiding. But that was only possible if they had a non-Jewish confidante who was willing to put their life on the line, or paid a high fee.
Anne Frank’s story is a famous example of a family that went into hiding but eventually got caught by an anonymous tip and sent to concentration camps.
In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were deployed again during the invasion of the Soviet Union, following behind the front lines.
Over 1.5 million people were massacred in what is famously known as the “Holocaust by bullets.”
Then in 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, along with high-ranking Nazi officials, met secretly to come up with the “final solution to the Jewish question.” This meeting is known as the Wannsee Conference.
The solution was to “begin large-scale deportations from ghettos to death camps — killing centres in Poland with specially designed gassing facilities — and to concentration camps.”
But the “solution” didn’t only involve the Jews.
The Nazis also persecuted other groups of people. The Nazi genocide of the Roma (also known as the “gypsies”) amounted to over 250,000 deaths.
3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2 million Polish, over 250,000 disabled, over 1000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and countless homosexuals were murdered.
Basically, any other minority group that was considered “undesirable” or a threat to the “Aryan master race” as the Nazis called themselves, would be eliminated.
Once they realised that the Einsatzgruppen was too time-consuming, expensive, and psychologically damaging for the soldiers, they began to look for more ‘effective’ murder methods.
They started to experiment with gas and pesticide tablets on disabled people and Soviet prisoners.
At the actual gas chambers, cyanide-based pesticide tablets known as Zyklon B were dropped into air vents, killing those trapped inside in minutes.
The largest concentration camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where over 1 million were murdered.
2026 marks 81 years since the Holocaust ended with the liberation of concentration camps.
The Nazis tried to hide their heinous crimes, but soldiers fighting against Germany soon made their way in and discovered these concentration camps.
Despite their efforts, it wasn’t long before the world found out about the extent of the Holocaust.
On 27 January 1945, the Red Army took over Auschwitz-Birkenau and freed all those who were still alive.
On 30 April 1945, with the Red Army only blocks away, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the streets of Berlin.
The Holocaust remains one of the deadliest, most horrific occurrences of the past century.
This famous quote by Spanish philosopher George Santayana is written in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
For Holocaust survivors, remembering the past is inevitable — a trauma buried so deep that it may never escape them for generations to come.
The very least we can do is to share the burden of its memory, and to remember that some things in the past are not worth repeating.
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